FPA-Based Software Testing Metric Research And Practice

With rapid development of Software industry, customers pay more and more attention to software quality. Software testing is the last significant procedure to ensuring quality for software. How to evaluate the size of software testing, which in order to estimate the workload of testing and help draft the test plan to ensure the time schedule of testing? How to evaluate the number of defects in project and trace the defects which in order to effectively evaluate the quality of development or testing? All in all, we need a method to evaluate the size for testing in effective and accurate way.Firstly, this paper studies the principles and technologies of various software size measurement methods, and deeply analyzes estimating process and implementation rules of FPA (Function Point Analysis) method against IFPUG (International Function Point Users Group), and its limitation on test size measurement. Then, based on the feature of test size measurement, we manage to change some of the attributes and model of calculation. Finally, we select several projects as pilots to practice, following is the detailed jobs:1. Based on enhanced function point analysis, we manage to measure the size for testing. The result provides benchmarks for test evaluation afterwards.2. Based on enhanced function points and historical data of test effort, we manage to estimate the test effort. The result helps draft test plan and allocate resource.3. Based on enhanced function points and historical data of defects, we manage to estimate the number of defects and trace the defects, not only to evaluate the quality of development or testing, but also to determine the exit criteria for software testing.With the sufficient historical data, the experiments demonstrate that the enhanced FPA method could utilize into software testing measurement, and provides abundant theoretical fundament for software testing measurement. At the same time, our future work or other researchers could benefit the experimental knowledge about test measurement practice.